He wanted suddenly to go to her, comfort her, tell her that she was not badly broken, that a single crisscrossing of psychic Band-Aids should fix her, make her even better than she had been before.
Sheila. Cathy.
Their names came and repeated, clanging in his mind like bells, like words repeated until they are reduced to nonsense. Say your name over two hundred times and discover you are no one. Grief was impossible; he could feel only a fuzzy sense of embarrassment: they had taken him, run him slack-lunged, and he had turned out to be nothing but a horse’s ass after all. He remembered a boy from his grammar school days who had stood up to give the Pledge of Allegiance and his pants had fallen down.
The plane droned on and on. He sank into a three-quarter doze. Pictures came and went lazily, whole incidents were seen without any emotional color at all.
Then, a final scrapbook picture: a glossy eight-by-ten taken by a bored police photographer who had perhaps been chewing gum. Exhibit C, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. One ripped and sliced small body in a blood-drenched crib. Splatters and runnels 449
on the cheap stucco walls and the broken Mother Goose mobile bought for a dime. A great sticky clot on the secondhand teddy bear with one eye.
He snapped awake, full awake and bolt upright, with his mouth propped wide in a blabbering scream. The force expelled from his lungs was great enough to make his tongue flap like a sail. Everything, everything in the first-class compartment was suddenly clear and plangently real, overpowering, awful. It had the grainy reality of a scare tabloid newsie clip. Laughlin being dragged out of that shed in Topeka, for instance. Everything, everything was very real and in Technicolor.
Amelia screamed affrightedly in unison, cringing back in her seat with eyes as huge as cracked porcelain doorknobs, trying to cram a whole fist in her mouth.
Donahue came charging through the galley, his gun out. His eyes were small enthusiastic black beads. “What is it? What’s wrong? McCone?”
“No,” Richards said, feeling his heart slow just enough to keep his words from sounding squeezed and desperate. “Bad dream. My little girl. ”
“Oh.” Donahue’s eyes softened in counterfeit sympathy. He didn’t know how to do it very well. Perhaps he would be a goon all his life. Perhaps he would learn. He turned to go.
“Donahue?”
Donahue turned back warily.
“Had you pretty scared, didn’t I?”
“No. ” Donahue turned away on that short word. His neck was bunched. His buttocks in his tight blue uniform were as pretty as a girl’s.
“I can scare you worse,” Richards remarked. “I could threaten to take away your nose filter. ”
Exeunt Donahue.
Richards closed his eyes tiredly. The glossy eight-by-ten came back. Opened them.
Closed them. No glossy eight-by-ten. He waited, and when he was sure it was not going to come back (right away), he opened his eyes and thumbed on the Free-Vee.
It popped on and there was Killian.
Minus 011 and COUNTING
“Richards.” Killian leaned forward, making no effort to conceal his tension.
“I’ve decided to accept,” Richards said.
Killian leaned back and nothing smiled but his eyes. “I’m very glad,” he said.
Minus 010 and COUNTING
“Jesus,” Richards said. He was standing in the doorway to the pilot’s country.
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Holloway turned around. “Hi. ” He had been speaking to something called Detroit VOR. Duninger was drinking coffee.
The twin control consoles were untended. Yet they swerved, tipped, and fumed as if in response to ghost hands and feet. Dials swung. Lights flashed. There seemed to be a huge and constant input and output going on . . . to no one at all.
“Who’s driving the bus?” Richards asked, fascinated.
“Otto,” Duninger said.
“Otto?”
“Otto the automatic pilot. Get it? Shitty pun.” Duninger suddenly smiled. “Glad to have you on the team, fella. You may not believe this, but some of us guys were rooting for you pretty hard. ”
Richards nodded noncommittally.
Holloway stepped into the slightly awkward breach by saying: “Otto freaks me out, too. Even after twenty years of this. But he’s dead safe. Sophisticated as hell. It would make one of the old ones look like a . . . well, like an orange crate beside a Chippendale bureau.”
“Is that right?” Richards was staring out into the darkness.
“Yes. You lock on P.O.D.-point of destination-and Otto takes over, aided by Voice-Radar all the way. Makes the pilot pretty superfluous, except for takeoffs and landings. And in case of trouble.”
“Is there much you can do if there’s trouble?” Richards asked.
“We can pray,” Holloway said. Perhaps it was meant to sound jocular, but it came out with a strange sincerity that hung in the cabin.
“Do those wheels actually steer the plane?” Richards asked.
“Only up and down,” Duninger said. “The pedals control sideside motion.
“Sounds like a kid’s soapbox racer.”
“A little more complicated.” Holloway said. “Let’s just say there are a few more buttons to push.”
“What happens if Otto goes off his chump?”
“Never happens,” Duninger said with a grin. “If it did, you’d just override him. But the computer is never wrong, pal. ”
Richards wanted to leave, but the sight of the turning wheels, the minute, mindless adjustments of the pedals and switches, held him. Holloway and Duninger went back to their business-obscure numbers and communications filled with static.
Holloway looked back once, seemed surprised to see him still there. He grinned and pointed into the darkness. “You’ll see Harding coming up there soon.”
“How long?”
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“You’ll be able to see the horizon glow in five to six minutes.”
When Holloway turned around next, Richards was gone. He said to Duninger: “I’ll be glad when we set that guy down. He’s a spook”
Duninger looked down morosely, his face bathed in the green, luminescent glow of the controls. “He didn’t like Otto. You know that?”
“I know it,” Holloway said.
Minus 009 and COUNTING
Richards walked back down the narrow, hip-wide corridor. Friedman, the communications man, didn’t look up. Neither did Donahue. Richards stepped through into the galley and then halted.
The smell of coffee was strong and good. He poured himself a cup, added some instant creamer, and sat down in one of the stewardesses’s off-duty chairs. The Silex bubbled and steamed.
There was a complete stock of luxury frozen dinners in the see-through freezers. The liquor cabinet was fully stocked with midget airline bottles.
A man could have a good drunk, he thought.
He sipped his coffee. It was strong and fine. The Silex bubbled.
Here I am, he thought, and sipped. Yes, no question about it. Here he was, just sipping.
Pots and pans all neatly put away. The stainless steel sink gleaming like a chromium jewel in a Formica setting. And, of course, that Silex on the hotplate, bubbling and steaming. Sheila had always wanted a Silex. A Silex lasts, was her claim.
He was weeping.
There was a tiny toilet where only stewardess bottoms had squatted. The door was half ajar and he could see it, yes, even the blue, primly disinfected water in the bowl.
Defecate in tasteful splendor at fifty thousand feet.
He drank his coffee and watched the Silex bubble and steam, and he wept. The weeping was very calm and completely silent. It and his cup of coffee ended at the same time.
He got up and put his cup in the stainless steel sink. He picked up the Silex, holding it by its brown plastic handle, and carefully dumped the coffee down the drain. Tiny beads of condensation clung to the thick glass.
He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and went back into the narrow corridor. He stepped into Donahue’s compartment, carrying the Silex in one hand.
“Want some coffee?” Richards asked.
“No,” Donahue said curtly, without looking up.
“Sure you do,” Richards said, and swung the heavy glass pot down on Donahue’s bent 452
head with all the force he could manage.
Minus 008 and COUNTING
The effort ripped open the wound in his side for the third time, but the pot didn’t break. Richards wondered if it had been fortified with something (Vitamin B-12, perhaps?) to keep it from shattering in case of high level turbulence. It did take a huge, amazing blot of Donahue’s blood. He fell silently onto his map table. A runnel of blood ran across the plastic coating of the top one and began to drip.
“Roger five-by, C-one-niner-eight-four,” a radio voice said brightly.
Richards was still holding the Silex. It was matted with strands of Donahue’s hair.
He dropped it, but there was no chink. Carpeting even here. The glass bubble of the Silex rolled up at him, a winking, bloodshot eyeball. The glossy eight-by-ten of Cathy in her crib appeared unbidden and Richards shuddered.
He lifted Donahue’s dead weight by the hair and rummaged inside his blue flight jacket. The gun was there. He was about to drop Donahue’s head back to the map table, but paused, and yanked it up even further. Donahue’s mouth hung unhinged, an idiot leer.